You know those movies where some really talented kids with almost no money go out into the woods with a camera and some raspberry jam and come back with a movie that gets them into the big time? Oh, let's see, Sam Raimi with "The Evil Dead" or maybe Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez with "The Blair Witch Project"? You know those kinds of movies?

A festival breakout shocker that twists genre conventions into a jarring battery of scares.

Cabin Fever revisits the gore flick, with obvious results

Unsure of whether it wants to be a horror film, a comedy, a homage, a satire or a parable, "Cabin Fever" tries to cover every base; it jumps around like kids on those arcade games where the target lights up and you have to stomp on it. It assembles the standard package of horror heroes and heroines (sexy girl, nice girl, stalwart guy, uncertain guy, drunk guy) and takes them off for a post-exam holiday in the woods, where things get off to a bad start when a man covered with blood comes staggering out of the trees. What they eventually figure out is that the man has some kind of disease -- for which we could, I suppose, read AIDS or SARS -- and it may be catching. When the nice girl (Jordan Ladd) comes down with the symptoms, they lock her in a shed, but before long they're all threatened, and there is a scene where the sexy girl (Cerina Vincent) is shaving her legs in the bathtub and finds, eek, that she's shaving a scab.

Like The Blair Witch Project, this low-budget shocker by Eli Roth generated a substantial buzz on the festival circuit, and though its cheap scare tactics pale in comparison to the earlier film’s creeping paranoia, it clearly has more on its mind than the usual trash horror flick. Five college grads venture into the North Carolina […]